Thank You, Kay Hymowitz

Kay, I can do without the Brookly-Bashing but the Brooklyn Museum Bashing is not only tolerated but welcome - its a crime what the custodians of that institution have done with it.

City Journal
The Brooklyn Museum Strikes Again
Confusing hucksterism and art
Kay S. Hymowitz
3 April 2007

The Brooklyn Museum, like its home borough, has always suffered from an acute case of class envy toward its richer and more glamorous counterpart across the East River. Manhattan has Gilded Age mansions, the Oyster Bar, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Brooklyn has dems-and-dose tenements, Nathan’s Hot Dogs—and the museum that is its namesake. Its new Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art—the first site ever devoted entirely to the subject, with a permanent home for the classic late-1970s multimedia installation “The Dinner Party” and a temporary exhibit called “Global Feminisms”—must have struck administrators as a sure way to raise the museum’s standing.

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But “The Dinner Party” is also a cautionary reminder of the excesses of Second Wave feminism, above all its reductiveness. Everything—all meaning, all cultural excellence, all artistic aspiration—shrivels, compared with the weighty fact of female identity. Even while claiming to revive her guests from invisibility, Chicago manages to kill them off, stripping them of all distinctiveness outside their X chromosomes. The plate that she puts at Emily Dickinson’s seat—pink, vulval, made out of frilly lace—so completely misses the poet’s oracular uniqueness that you have to conclude she’s never read a word of her oeuvre. It makes perfect sense that Chicago’s work should find its resting place at today’s Brooklyn Museum. Both “The Dinner Party” and its new home are cultural entities that, mistrusting the power of art, fall back on sensation and no small measure of hucksterism.

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By Brooklyn standards, the Sackler Center must have cost a pretty penny—officials are playing coy about the exact amount—which makes its hyped-up pieties all the more depressing. Its donor, Elizabeth Sackler, is the daughter of philanthropist Arthur Sackler, whose own legacy is the elegant wing that houses the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I imagine that I wasn’t the only Brooklynite thinking: “They get the Temple of Dendur; we get ‘The Dinner Party’ and ‘Global Feminisms.’ It figures.”